The home secretary, Charles Clarke, is to press today's emergency European counter-terrorism summit to adopt a plan to compulsorily fingerprint all EU citizens who already carry identity cards.
The scheme is a crucial part of a 10-point anti-terrorism package that includes the retention of email and phone records for up to three years which Mr Clarke will propose when he chairs the emergency summit called in the wake of the London bombings.
The outline of the plan for all ID cards in Europe to carry an electronic fingerprint was submitted to a high-level strategic committee on immigration, frontiers and asylum on Tuesday by British officials acting in their capacity as the presidency of the EU.
"Identity cards are valid travel documents. We cannot afford to have them be a weak link in international travel," a Home Office spokesman said, confirming the plan.
"A really significant amount of travel within Europe is done not on a passport but on an identity card which is just a piece of cardboard with a photograph attached. It is a weak link. We need to have a common standard."
The spokesman stressed, however, that the measure would not mean the EU was compelling those countries which do not have ID cards to adopt them.
Britain is to start introducing "biometric" passports from next year; all applicants will have to go to one of 70 new centres to be fingerprinted and have their face "scanned". In December the EU decided that all passport holders, visitors and foreign resident nationals should be fingerprinted.
The proposal to extend this to identity card holders with implementation to start in 2006 means that most EU citizens, including the French and Germans who have only cardboard ID cards, will be fingerprinted as well.
Tony Bunyan of Statewatch, which monitors civil liberties in the EU, said: "This proposal, with others, means that everyone living in the EU and their details are held on an EU-wide database.
"At a time of great tragedy it is all the more important that we act with care and do not bequeath to future generations a society where every movement and every communication is under surveillance."
The EU emergency council of justice and home affairs ministers are also expected to agree measures including a register of stolen or missing explosives, and to make more intensive efforts to tackle the problem of stolen passports.
The British internet industry said last night it had not been consulted over the proposal for the compulsory retention of email and phone records. A voluntary code in force requires most internet data to be held for six months and some phone records for a year.
· Countries that fail to crack down on terrorist money laundering face the threat of sanctions, Gordon Brown warned yesterday as he chaired a meeting of EU finance ministers in Brussels.
The chancellor said cutting off funds to terrorists hampered their work and penetrating their financial networks provided crucial details about terrorist plans.